“... in the First World War, on the grounds that the alliance was a defensive arrangement. Then, on 24 May 1915, it declared war on Austria-Hungary. The decision was taken by the king and a minority of the cabinet, without the approval of parliament, after secret meetings in London at which the Entente powers promised that, in the event of victory, Italy would be ...”

“... of instability, movement, pressure – something approaching synaptic assault, a feeling that may seem familiar to anyone who has spent time in Midtown or Lower Manhattan during working hours. This effect is amplified by the proliferation of reflections and refractions from the windows of the moving trains. Another tendency both poets share, and which ...”

“... silence is to protect their careers, but others’ silence is the fear of hypocrisy, knowing they may be guilty of something similar. It’s time to redistribute some of the shame and responsibility women feel around this. It belongs to those men, and their silent friends. Because if, as a boyfriend once put it to me – ‘status is to women what beauty is ...”

“... more than thirty years. He is a modest figure, who has led a life according to his principles. He may well have been naive about some of the people he has met and platforms he has shared, but the idea that he is a communist agent is risible. I suppose we’re in for a lot of this as we get closer to another election. On polling day in 2017 an article appeared ...”

“... in the big new gallery space is Actions: The image of the world can be different (until 6 May). It takes its title from a letter written by Ede’s friend Naum Gabo to Herbert Read: ‘Any thing or action which enhances life, propels it and adds to it something in the direction of growth, expansion and development, is Constructive … I try to guard ...”

“... the now missing object, even if her chairs specifically do nothing to conjure the people who may once have sat on them. At the entrance to the exhibition, in an anteroom dedicated to Whiteread’s various public commissions (plans for her inverted resin cast of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, a model of her Holocaust memorial in Vienna), there’s ...”

“... when you begin to look at them properly that they seem stranded, shipwrecked by history. ‘Age may not weary them,’ Geoff Dyer has written of the army of bronze soldiers on permanent guard at First World War memorials, ‘but … powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a ...”

“... commission, this time for the British, soon followed. A Battery Shelled Life, Art, War may be the Imperial War Museum’s attempt to make amends for the fact that Lewis’s war commissions were suppressed for so long: neither A Canadian Gun-Pit (1918) nor A Battery Shelled (1919), both extraordinary paintings, were popular with the bodies which ...”

“... with a flashlight making sure all was dim and curtains drawn. When Germany surrendered on 7 May 1945 people flocked to the streets cheering, car horns honked, neighbours embraced, and Mr Zank’s expression seemed to indicate that he had done his part for the war effort. Over the following months our men started coming home, some on crutches, some in ...”

“... siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. When Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister, announced in May 2003 that there were plans to ‘take care of Arafat’, Avnery and other activists made their way to the West Bank to sit outside Arafat’s door. Arafat survived the night, but died a year later; Avnery never hid his belief that he had been poisoned, on the ...”

“... on the girl’s skirt and the stripes on the boy’s jacket are frantically busy; the figures may be fixed, doll-like, but things whirl chaotically, noisily around them. There’s prettiness, domesticity and decoration in Cooke’s work, but at the same time an interest in abstraction. She could be masterful in her use of space and colour to create and ...”

“... there are three more – will have something to do with walls and whether the volume’s title may be a larger clue than it looks. The answer is yes and no. There are walls in all the stories but one, but some are just walls, not metaphors or destinies. But then the wall in the last story, a place where a Jew is beaten up by eager French fascists, does ...”

“... blur such distinctions, but the installation at BAMPFA betrays an anxiety about the way audiences may understand this work, or misunderstand it. Works by non-professional makers – sometimes called ‘self-taught’, ‘outsider’ or ‘outlier’ – have been making their way into art institutions for some time, but Black women artists who work with ...”

“... the panther, the partridge, the whale and, at considerable length, the phoenix. The Latin version may well have been a set text for medieval schoolboys, and possibly also constituted a permissible entertainment for monastic refectories. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (c.610) expanded on the Physiologus by relating the Latin names of animals to any word ...”

“... the poem a peculiarly static feel, as though something is always on the cusp of being said. That may not be entirely Mirrlees’s fault. The poem begins with an invocation to Harrison; it ends with a private message to her, in the constellation of the Great Bear, picked out in asterisks. The two women referred to each other as the two wives in a ménage à ...”